Authorities began blocking Telegram IP addresses

Over the weekend, the Internet outage tracking service Sboy.rf recorded a multiple increase in complaints about problems with access to Telegram. Experts interviewed by Kommersant FM said that the messenger had begun to be blocked. A significant increase in Telegram blocking was also recorded by the “On Connection” technical support service. At the same time, the blocking increased not only quantitatively: along with the persistence of throttling (slowdown) of the messenger, cases of complete blocking of IP addresses of the Telegram infrastructure were recorded, a representative of “On Contact” told the Agency.

Details. According to Sboy.rf, the number of complaints about Telegram’s work in Russia began to grow on Wednesday, when the service received 681 complaints against 94 the day before. By Sunday, the number of complaints reached 12.7 thousand. On Monday, in less than a full day, users complained about problems with the messenger 5.9 thousand times (the same number for the entire Saturday).

• Almost half of all complaints (47%) over the past 12 hours were received from Moscow, according to data from Sboy.rf. In 10% of cases, St. Petersburg residents complained about problems with the messenger, and in 8%, residents of the Moscow region.

• According to another crash tracking service, Downdetector, 11 Russian cities have complained about problems with Telegram over the past 24 hours. In total, 7.7 thousand complaints were received from them. The author of one of the complaints said that Telegram “does not work in any form - web/desktop/application/wifi/lte - now only a proxy.” Other complaints reported an inability to load the app, problems loading media, and problems sending and receiving messages.

• The increase in anomalies in the work of Telegram in Russia is also recorded by the open data platform on Internet censorship OONI Explorer. On Friday, their percentage compared to regular calls to the service was about 5%, on Saturday - about 12%, on Sunday - more than 21%. The same percentage of anomalies was in the first half of Monday.

• On Sunday, complaints emerged that the desktop version of Telegram had stopped working, Alexey Amelkin, president of the Association of Telecom Operators MAKATEL, told Kommersant FM. “Government agencies apply different conditions in different regions, perhaps this is for testing,” Amelkin said.
• Over the past 24 hours, Telegram has actually stopped loading from the home Internet when it comes to “connecting from Russian IP addresses,” said techno-expert and author of the IT publication “Durov’s Code” Vladislav Voitenko.
• If in recent months there has been a slowdown in traffic, now in a number of regions (and in Moscow) cases of complete blocking of IP addresses of the Telegram infrastructure have been recorded, a representative of the “On Connection” project told the Agency. “We are still investigating the scale, but off the top of my head, IP blocking affected about 20-30% of providers. Restrictions apply throughout Russia,” the expert said.
• VPN allows you to continue using Telegram even when the messenger is blocked by IP, wrote a representative of “On Connection”.
• In 2018, Roskomnadzor already blocked millions of IP addresses used by Telegram. As a result, users began to experience problems with dozens of different services, including Google search, the Mastercard payment system and others that used the same IP as Telegram.

Context. This time, the consequences of blocking Telegram will not be so noticeable. The strangulation of the messenger takes place against the backdrop of mobile Internet shutdowns throughout the country. The week before last they reached Moscow. Since March 5, problems were observed throughout the city, but the situation was worst in the center.

• Against this background, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced a record drone attack: from Saturday to Monday morning, the capital was attacked by about 250 UAVs. After this, the mayor announced the destruction of 13 more drones flying towards the city. And posts with armed people and special equipment appeared near the Kremlin, as evidenced by photographs published by the Cheka-OGPU.
• The strange thing about the attack is that there are practically no photos or videos of the attack on social networks.

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